PhD / MPhil students in SELCS / CMII
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Comparative Literature
- Buket Boz - On Night: Darkness in Vulnerability and Transgression.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Florian Mussgnug (principal) and Dr Emily Baker (subsidiary)
Investigating the visual and spatial connotations of night, my research connects darkness with vulnerability and transgression. At the turn of the twenty-first century, night has come to be acknowledged by scholars and writers for being a space of freedom for the marginalized Other, and a shelter from the anxieties triggered by day’s penetrating light. My project speaks to this relatively recent approach that reinforces the multifaceted qualities of night.
Through the novels I analyse, which problematise reality by creating ‘irrealities’, I hope to emphasise night’s role in challenging the dependency on visual and spatial perception. Drawing on the (anti)ocular and spatial theories namely that of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Juhani Pallasmaa and Judith Butler, I demonstrate how night influences one’s (self)perception, and I argue that darkness, by stimulating vulnerability and transgression, subverts totalitarian notions about ‘seeing’ which emphasise surveillance, homogenisation and discipline. I explore vulnerability and transgression in terms of the activities that are traditionally dedicated to night-time (sleeping, dreaming and having sex) and metaphorically nocturnal faculties (imagination and memory). Through this analysis, I aim to bring various aspects of night to forefront to accentuate the value of the invisible, intangible, and the irrational.
- Serena (Qihui) Pei - Contemplation on the conceptual affinities and historical convergence between Chinese Daoism and British Romanticism.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Stephen M. Hart (principal), Prof. Peter Swaab and Dr Xiaofan Amy Li (subsidiary)
In his article ‘Coleridge’s Daoism?’ (Wordsworth Circle 2020), Chris Murray traces the historical evidence of Coleridge’s reading on Daoism. When he was a student at Jesus College, Cambridge, in June 1793, Coleridge borrowed the second edition of A Collection of Voyages and Travels (1732). According to the library register account, Coleridge was the first person to borrow this edition, and after him, no one else withdrew this book for a decade afterward. This book contains an English translation of An Account of the Empire of China (1676), including sections on Daoism written by the Spanish Dominican, Domingo Fernández Navarrete (1618 – 1689). Navarrete’s missionary work remained the only serious treatment of Daoism in Europe until 1823, when Jean Pierre Abel-Rémusat published a French translation of five chapters from Daodejing. My research is a further study on both conceptual affinities and historical convergence between British Romanticism and Daoism.
Based on philosophical and literary texts as well as archival materials, I investigate, for example, the philosophical affinities between Coleridge’s ‘dynamic polarity’ in his Theory of Life (1816) and Daoist cosmology; as well as the possible historical convergence between Daoism and Romanticism via Schelling and Thomas Manning, who was a close friend of Charles Lamb, and had obtained first-hand knowledge of Chinese culture during his stay in China between 1807 – 1817. This comparative study can contribute to a wider rethinking of Sinological influence on the Romantic Circle, and it also highlights the broader complexity of cultural exchange between Georgian Britain and China at the dawn of the Opium War.
- Jiang Yishan - Rethinking Chinese Modernity: A Comparative Literary Study of Chinese Kinship as Cultural Discourse (1900–1949).
Supervisor(s): Prof Stephen M. Hart (principal) and Dr Xiaofan Amy Li (subsidiary)
Kinship is typically discussed in the anthropological and biological domains in terms of various definitions that rely on direct or indirect connections to reproduction and genes, or blood-based relationships. However, this comparative literature dissertation, Rethinking Modernity: A Comparative Literary Study of Chinese Kinship as Cultural Discourse (1900–1949), focuses on demonstrating the transformation of Chinese kinship as a cultural discourse that helped to shape the emergence of Chinese modernity during the period from 1900 to 1949. This study, therefore, goes beyond those previous studies that have exclusively emphasised the role played by two parameters – individualism and nationalism – in their assessment of modernity.
By drawing upon twentieth-century Chinese and American novels; historical materials, including influential magazines and newspapers; gender and post-colonial theories, and translation studies, this project takes a different tack from those studies that focus exclusively on individualism and nationalism as the parameters used to understand modernity. My project argues that the Chinese jia (family), as one character of the word guojia (state-family), was a central space for intellectuals and writers to envision twentieth-century China and its emergence into modernity.
- Bee Sachsse (Elizabeth) - Evolving Representations of Fatness in Anglophone and Francophone Prose Fiction.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Patrick Bray (principal) and Dr. Leah Sidi (subsidairy)
My research focuses on fatness in anglophone and francophone fiction, weaving together existing scholarship on the history of the novel form and the history of fatness and anti-fat bias. This will be one of very few literary studies of fatness to meaningfully engage historical, sociological, scientific, and art historical studies of fatness.
One part of my research will develop a theory of the obscurity of fat characters in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, building on previous work in queer and affect studies. This research will stem from close readings of fat characters in key texts, with particular attention paid to the ways that texts leverage certain affects to create the sense that fat characters lie outside prose fiction’s representational capability. In considering the flatness or sheer unintelligibility of certain fat characters, my research will present an opportunity to extend and refine previous thinking on disability, abjection, and affect as they intersect in literature.
The other part of my research will seek to understand how the parallel developments of anti-fat bias and the novel form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in fat characters’ obscurity in later novels. My readings of British and French novels of the period will be informed by existing historical research, with particular attention paid to racial and scientific discourses on fatness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I will examine how evolving literary, medical, economic, and philosophic discourses on the body and the individual to create the figure of the fat person as the perfect anti-novelistic subject—a being governed by type rather than individual circumstance or will. In reading novels from the period, I will chart the relationship between body size and the degree to which a character is presented as an individual, or as socially or naturally determined.
My readings of fatness in British and French novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will also draw from previous scholarship on interiority in novels. By comparing the use of free indirect style in portrayals of fat and thin characters in nineteenth-century novels, I will look for stylistic antecedents of the contemporary novel’s reluctance to imagine fat characters’ interiority.
My work advances literary studies by bringing together several strands of literary and social scientific inquiry: novel history and theory, feminist and queer theory, disability studies, the history of race and empire, and the history of science. Studying fatness in prose fiction allows us to probe the limits of the vivid interiority and individuality often taken as a defining feature of the novel or short fiction. In doing so, my research will illuminate how social and scientific history and norms shape imagination itself, as traceable in literature.
- Stephanie Ng - On Compromise: Neoliberalism, Feminism, and the Disappointed Promise of Personhood.
Supervisor(s): Dr. Hans Demeyer (principal) and Dr. Kevin Inston (subsidairy)
My project starts from the observation that women in the contemporary present are, by all legal accounts, full-fledged citizens, yet they must nonetheless encounter themselves as nonsovereign. I read twenty-first century, Anglo-American fiction through a psychoaffective and largely reparative lens, focusing on the strategies enacted by women who pluck up the courage to live differently – outside the bounds of a generic femininity – only to encounter the necessity of yielding to others for the sake of ongoingness and belonging.
- Morgan Lewis - Foreigners, outlaws and gendered terrors: monstrosity and the abject in Icelandic and Japanese fiction.
Supervisor(s): Dr Cristina Massaccesi (principal) and Dr Helga Lúthersdottir (subsidairy)
My research focuses on the abject and the monstrous as represented in the fictive traditions of Iceland and Japan. I am especially interested in abject or monstrous characterisations of ‘foreignness’, criminality, gender and kinship in the cultural products of these externally exoticised island nations. In examining such characterisations contextually and from an intersecting psychoanalytic, nissological and monster theory-based perspective, I aim to contribute to existing understanding of the semiotic functions performed by the monstrous and the abject in human storytelling.
- Emily Moore - Jazz and Blues in the work of Gayl Jones.
Supervisor(s): Prof Paul Gilroy (principal) and Dr Christine Yao (subsidairy)
This project will explore Jazz and The Blues in the work of Gayl Jones, seeking to discern precisely how Jones translates or transcribes musical techniques into literary ones and renders her written texts distinctly oral. My central research enquiry is to decipher the aesthetic and political purposes Jones' musical techniques serve. In answering this, I will explore the way in which they can facilitate psychological recovery from trauma, assert individual, national and racial identity and absorb and confront the enduring legacy of slavery in modern America. This study seeks to redress an imbalance by attending to the work of a much neglected author and taking account of her entire oeuvre, including her later novels and poetry collections that have received startlingly little attention. In considering Jones' musical techniques, this project will acknowledge and investigate Jones' innovation and experimental formal skill that has been submitted by critical attention, often hostile to her work's thematic content. Timely with the recent republication of some of Jones' novels, the project hopes to amplify a significantly aural, but often over-looked voice.
- Oliver Eccles - Customs and Duties: Importing the Detective Across Networks of World Literature.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (principal) and Dr Xiaofan Amy Li (subsidairy)
My research is an original comparative study of crime fiction in Japan and Argentina, from the mid-nineteenth- until the early-twentieth-century. This study will reframe our understanding of world literature and reveal surprising parallels in global responses to European modernity. Crime fiction’s popularity, at a time of growing international networks, is an essential case study for literature’s role in the spread and reception of cultural ideas. Despite their geographic separation, both Japan and Argentina were involved in nation-building projects modelled on European notions of modernity. Yet contrary to Eurocentric scholarship to date, Japan and Argentina were not passive recipients of European storytelling; building upon local traditions, their innovative literary developments challenge our assumptions about cultural influence and the nature of authority, both narrative and political.
My project draws upon literary, media, legal and criminological sources to examine the movement of ideas surrounding crime and transgression. In doing so, it will re-evaluate the roles of translation and adaptation, together with the foundation of modern newspaper cultures and law enforcement structures. Working with primary and secondary texts in Spanish, Japanese, French and English, it will spark interdisciplinary conversations between hitherto separate scholarship in Latin America and Japan Studies, whilst also reaching beyond academia.
- Yichun Zhang - History as Fiction, or Fiction as History? - Gothic Waterscape and Cityscape in Neo-Victorian Novels.
Supervisor(s): Dr James Kneale (principal) and Dr Joana Jacob Ramalho (subsidairy)
My thesis examines the representations of literary cityscapes and waterscapes in the late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century Neo-Victorian fiction, with special emphasises on their spatio-temporal structures and features. To contribute to knowledge, I aim to demonstrate the value of reading these spatialised texts through ecocritical, postcolonial and cultural theories, arguing that an examination of time and space is central to our interpretation of “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon 1989).
Bringing together literary studies, geocriticism, and urban studies, my quest is to answer: Why space, or spatial factors are important in analysing a text? Can the setting of a text, or a physical/geographical place be a text? What transgressive spaces and places does Neo-Victorianism offer to challenge our preconceived notions of place and space? How do Neo-Victorian texts form or investigate the spatial configurations of Victorian as well as contemporary cities? What interesting relationship do these Neo-Victorian texts bring time and space into? These Neo-Victorian texts portray liminal spaces, including dockside slums, opium dens, and underground rivers and sewers depicted in Neo-Victorian fiction set in London. Highlighting these marginal but transgressive places, it will uncover the complex tensions between imperial anxieties, marginal urban topographies, class inequality, and discourses of contagion.
This will be achieved through an examination of London cityscapes and waterscapes in Neo-Victorian fiction by authors such as Iain Sinclair, A.S. Byatt, Matthew Kneale, Clare Clark and Dan Simmons. / Since space and place are the key concepts that I will define through a spatially inflected reading of Neo-Victorian fiction and dialogue with scholarship in spatial literary studies, the idea of travel is central to my enquiry. This is because travelling has both spatial and temporal aspects in its nature. In each chapter I will address different versions of it, ranging from journeys through geographical, social or physical places to imaginative, metaphorical journeys. I hope to argue that through writing, reading, and interpreting Neo-Victorian fiction, our relationship with the past, and with the process of writing history, is spatial.
- Haizhi Wu - Pandemic Narratives between Personal Experiences and Public Crises: (Re) Imagining Geographies of Survival in U.S. - American Novels, 1980s-2020s.
Supervisor(s): Dr James Kneale (principal), Dr Lara Choksey (subsidairy) and Dr Leah Sidi (subsidiary)
My thesis focuses on contemporary pandemic narratives in American novels since the 1980s, examining the roles spaces have played in connecting personal experiences to public crises. My discussion sketches out the historical evolution of pandemic narratives at the turn when literary representations of the HIV/AIDS, pandemic apocalypse, and COVID-19 proliferated. The historical and thematic reading of the pandemic narratives has informed the opportunity to establish dialogues between American novelists’ spatial imaginations and cultural geographical discourses. In this sense, I propose a model of geographical reading to illustrate the power of spaces that radiate from the centre of the fictional texts and literary history to broader contexts, including epidemiology, urban studies, and postmodern geography. My central interest is in the conceptualization of and division between “inside” and “outside,” something that relations between the private and public derive from and go beyond. My thesis provides a critical intervention in literary-historical scholarship and spatial medical humanities by foregrounding the phenomenology of pandemic survival in contemporary American novels.
- Elizabeth Wang - (Re)Mapping the Virtual and the Imaginary: Site-Specific Video Installations and Digitally Mediated Heterotopias.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Florian Mussgnug (principal) and Dr Annie Ring (subsidiary)
My thesis is an investigation into the epistemological and phenomenological process of site-specific media installations: artistic experiments that comprise light particles and sound waves, site-specific media installations are catalytic and reactionary to their surrounding spatial orders. They illuminate the potential to opening new, alternative spaces in-between situated places, wherein new kinds of analytics may be realised and employed within the wounded social spacings of the Anthropocene.
Through tracing the affective operations shared between the artworks and their sites, my research aims to contribute to theorisations that explore lived spaces of the human and nonhuman, in an attempt to tend to their precarious realities as entangled existences, offering imaginative ways of coexistence in our shared world. In particular, I explore the transitory moments in which site-specific media installations are able to suspect, neutralise, and invert the familiar textures of space, facilitating surprising forms of unexpected ties between different life forms across multiple spatial and temporal planes.
Revisiting Michel Foucault’s 1967 notion of the heterotopia, my thesis shines light on the installations’ ability to create alternative emplacements wherein different forms of life may persevere in an environment that is perceived as othering to those ways of being. By disrupting the flow or passage of linear space and time, heterotopias illuminate transitional spaces where all forms of life are challenged to assimilate diversity, wherein entanglements of material and immaterial elements may offer a (re)mapping of the phenomenology of place. I posit that the spaces animated by site-specific media installations make excellent examples of Foucault’s conception of the heterotopia, and moreover couple the operations of play through their performative qualities.
- Gisele Edwards - Balancing Act: Embodying the Artist.
Supervisor(s): Dr Peter Zusi (principal), Dr Elija Taiwo (subsidiary) and Gary Stevens (subsidiary)
My thesis is an exploration of the nature of embodiment and abstraction and how these enable artistic form. Abstracting is a key trait of human behaviour. By definition abstraction is a conceptual process, or the outcome of such a process. Abstract concepts (such as “fun’, unlike concrete ones such as “dog”) do not have a bounded or physical, identifiable object or referent. Neither are they physically practicable. Embodiment, on the other hand, is a bringing into or presentation in or through a tangible or visible form. According to Reinboth and Farkas, embodiment refers to the derivation of meaning from the apparatus, faculties and states of the [physical] body of the agent. Given this distinction, abstraction and embodiment have historically been regarded as largely uncorrelated, and interrogated separately.
In recent years however, the debate and approach has shifted, to one in support of an embodied approach to understanding abstraction. This change has come primarily from within cognitive sciences, reflecting the increased interest in the field in ‘situated action’, that looks to solve problems not through how humans think but to how they act within their environments. As a physical artist I am creatively and intellectually interested in this paradox. Abstraction and embodiment are both fundamental to the way I make work. In my research I will work through my medium and re-evaluate these ideas within my process, in the context of this developing debate.
In doing so I hope to shed some light on the co-presence and -operation of abstraction and embodiment from a practitioner’s perspective, that may be of interest to other embodied practitioners and artists. I also hope to open up a discussion about our relationship to space and form and draw attention to how we listen to, observe and notice through conscious embodied awareness and encounter, and how these encounters might be rendered in poetic form. I am interested too in the phenomenon or question of re-cognising, or re-grounding the act of abstracting into conscious relationship with (awareness of) our bodies. As well as allowing us to better know (and potentially be) ourselves, such an embodied awareness of our co-existing capacities to embody and abstract may give us the edge over, or a potential intelligence advantage in regard to how we manage, develop, interface and control AI (which, as yet, has no biological body.)
- Sophie Braconnier - Shifting Representations of Anthropomorphic Animals in European and Anglophone Prose Fiction: A Comparative Study.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Florian Mussgnug (principal) and Professor Mererid Puw Davies (subsidiary)
My doctoral research is concerned with animal studies and animal representation, specifically it aims to explore the representation of anthropomorphised animals in certain European and anglophone texts. I will use the depiction of anthropomorphised animals in various fables and nineteenth century satirical texts as a jumping-off point to consider the history of this trope. Crucially, I am interested in the question of whether we can observe a notable shift away from anthropocentrism and toward a new ecocritical awareness in these more recent texts. Before the emergence of animal studies as a diverse and productive academic field, depictions of anthropomorphised animals, from fairy tales to animated Disney movies, have often been primarily associated with a younger audience, or characterised as sentimental, and inherently less profound than entirely human characters. While numerous scholars active in the field of animal studies have been successful in elevating animals and our relationship with them to something worthy of study in a variety of contexts, the ecocritical potential of specifically anthropomorphised animals which blur the boundaries between the human and the non-human has thus far been relatively unexplored. I therefore believe that this project will form an important contribution to the field of academic animal studies by reframing both our understanding of anthropomorphised animals in literary texts, and, in doing so, examining what ecocritical perspectives emerge from, and are expressed by, this representation.
- Joshua Clark - A cross-cultural examination of the linguistic signification of depression in French, German, and English film and literature.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Sonu Shamdasani (principal) and James Agar (subsidiary)
This research project is a cross-linguistic analysis of depression. It aims to critically examine the language used to represent depression, evaluating our collective understanding of mental health and illness. By first exploring the metaphorical constructions and biomedical discourses surrounding depression, we can challenge an often undifferentiated diagnostic identity. The study employs a comparative linguistic analysis across English, French, and German with a view to exploring how cultural and linguistic nuances shape conceptualisations of depression. In this sense, using specific films and literary works across these languages, this project seeks to trace the usage of particular linguistic features, such as metaphor, in representations of depression, and to explore the family network of concepts within these languages. Analysing the metaphorical resonances across these languages provides the opportunity to engage with our awareness differently and to acknowledge different ways of looking. For example, films such as, "Little Miss Sunshine", "De Rouille et d’os", provide an opportunity to unravel the metaphorical conventions employed in visual representations of depression.
Additionally, literary works like Ocean Vuong's On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, and Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten are analysed to examine how text differently construes depression. While certain representations can be seen to uncritically absorb and replicate an essentially medicalised understanding of depression, other narratives subvert these conventions and offer new ways of understanding experience. The goal of this project is to evaluate the language they employ in representing depression and the broader consequences of these linguistic choices. By addressing gaps in research on the linguistic analysis of depression representations, this project offers insights into the multiplicity of conditions often collectively understood as depression. It emphasises the need for a nuanced, culturally sensitive approach to mental health discourse, fostering critical awareness beyond conventional biomedical definitions. Ultimately, this interdisciplinary study contributes valuable perspectives to healthcare professionals across different languages, and enriches discussions in psychoanalysis and psychiatry.
- Francesca Balestro - Everyday Anthropocene Life Narratives: Conflicting Scales, Affects, and Form in the Contemporary Novel.
Supervisor(s): Dr Hans Demeyer (principal) and Dr Stefano Rossoni (subsidiary)
When asking “What is an individual life?”, author Daisy Hildyard (2017, 101) illuminates the challenge of narrating an individual life that is profoundly entangled with larger social and ecological phenomena. My research explores the extent to which 21st-century novels written in English, Italian and French negotiate individual life narratives with the massive scales disclosed by the Anthropocene, raising questions such as: To what extent do contemporary novels narrate individual lives while retaining larger scales of phenomena? What role do affects play in the negotiation between conflicting scales within the novels? Do individual and planetary scales mutually exclude each other? Can large-scale phenomena be represented through individual life stories, and if so, what narrative techniques do these texts employ? In exploring these questions, my research argues that 21st-century novels engage with the dissemination of the Anthropocene not only through genre fiction, but also through an emphasis on affects, everyday practices, and formal experimentalism. My overarching research objective is to highlight how these novels reposition individual lives amidst planetary scales, offering new ways to engage, cope with, and react to the impending scenarios of individual irrelevance. In mapping and analysing this genre I call “everyday Anthropocene life narratives”, my project breaks new ground for the scholarship of the Anthropocene. It considers a broader range of texts beyond the overstudied corpus of genre fiction (sci-fi, dystopian, apocalyptic fiction), including several subgenres such as autofiction, memoir, and life-writing narratives, which have not been thoroughly explored within the field of the Anthropocene. It prioritises a focus on conflicting scales over an excessive emphasis on large scales, and it overcomes the Anglophone bias of existing research through the analysis of a multilingual corpus of novels.
Early Modern Studies
- Anna Schiffer - Sir Philip Sidney’s European Tour (1572-75); its influence on his An Apology for Poetry and on later English poetry.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Edward Chaney (principal) and Dr Alexander Samson (subsidiary)
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was an Elizabethan courtier, diplomat, soldier and later poet. My research examines how, and the extent to which, An Apology for Poetry (and its impact on English literature) resulted from the tour of Europe that he had made between June 1572 and May 1575. It analyses this link in a way that has not been done before by connecting the biographical detail of the tour with the concepts underlying An Apology for Poetry. This detail will include the experiences of the tour, its locations as well as the confessional, artistic and political influences on Sidney of the range of individuals and groups that he met in continental Europe. The argument is that without the tour An Apology for Poetry would not exist in the form that it does.
- Samantha Brown - English Encounter and Engagement with the Arabic Language, 1524-1635.
Supervisor(s): Dr Robyn Adams (principal) and Dr Matthew Symonds (subsidiary)
Previous scholarship on the early modern study of Arabic has predominantly focused on the pioneering ‘Arabists’ of mainland Europe, whose success is measured in terms of books printed and institutional positions held. England lagged behind, only producing scholars of note in the seventeenth century, and little is known about engagement with the language in its earliest period of study. Through surveys of marginalia, manuscripts and formative library collections, my thesis will shed new light on the earliest period of Arabic studies in England, arguing that no history of the field is complete without an understanding of linguistic encounter and engagement at every level: from the ‘unlearned’ and enthusiastic dabblers, to overlooked experts and sought-after teachers.
After gaining a BA in Arabic & Islamic Studies from SOAS I spent almost a decade producing documentaries for the BBC and other major UK broadcasters. In 2018 I returned to academia to pursue my love of history, and UCL’s MA in Early Modern Studies introduced me to the world of manuscripts, archives and early printed books. In 2020 I co-founded Miscellany, an online community for ECR early modernists engaged with book history. From 2022-3 I was a research assistant on David Pearson’s Book Owners Online project. From April to October 2024 I will undertake a doctoral fellowship investigating the provenance of Arabic manuscripts in the collections of the National Trust and the British Library.
European Studies
- Gabriel Wartinger - Ontological Sovereignty and the Ontology of Suspension.
Supervisor(s): Dr Kevin Inston (principal), Dr Hans Demeyer (subsidiary)
My research project evaluates the notion of sovereignty within Western philosophy and political thought. In political theory, sovereignty is interpreted as a historical event signifying the transition from divine authority to secular rule. Philosophically, it can be provisionally interpreted as an originary force, autonomous and impervious to external influence.
This project examines sovereignty from the perspective of political philosophy, a discipline marked by the fragile boundaries between 'philosophical' and 'political' thought. To trace these complexities, I propose the framework of ontological suspension.
Ontological suspension is conceptualized as a state where political entities, norms, and practices exist in a precarious equilibrium— neither fully consolidated nor completely dissolved. This state, characterized by conditional and exceptional phases, offers a nuanced understanding of how political authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty are constructed, sustained, and potentially subverted.
Film Studies
- Thomas Greggs - Cinema and the Nationalised Coal Industry: Media, Energy, and the Political Economy of Britain, 1947-1994.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Lee Grieveson (principal) and Prof. John Tomaney (subsidiary)
Cinema and the Nationalised Coal Industry explores how the National Coal Board (NCB) used media, principally cinema, to facilitate and mediate the management and operation of the British coal industry in the era of public ownership. It uncovers a vast, decade-spanning corpus, testament to the vigorous and enduring commitment of an elite state institution to the production and circulation of moving images. It examines the media produced by the NCB (latterly the British Coal Corporation) as well as the way it circulated in Britain and abroad. Cinema as a didactic and persuasive form of mass communication, used in theatrical and nontheatrical settings, and for a wide range of internal and external purposes, is an important part of this media history. Equally important are the broader histories with which NCB media intersects: the history of national energy supply (the transition from British coal to foreign oil and natural gas); and of British politics and economics (from a planned economy with industrial production at its core to the rise of neoliberalism, the free market, and the deindustrialisation of Britain). Cinema and the Nationalised Coal Industry investigates the relationship between cinema and the NCB for what it reveals about British energy history and the political economy of Britain in the mid-to-late twentieth century and, more specifically, the ways media was shaped and used to supplement the political and economic policies and practices of both an extractive industry and the state.
- Shiyi Jiang - Kitchen modernisation and useful media in the U.S., 1915-1959.
Supervisor(s): Lee Grieveson (principal) and Claire Thomson (subsidiary).
Electrification not only illuminated homes, it importantly re-shaped the domestic space. Technology companies, as major home appliance manufacturers, worked to modernise domesticity and transformed the kitchen into a modern technology-testing laboratory. My research focuses on how institutions such as corporations and government agencies shared in the capitalist revolution to transform the kitchen in the United States; with General Electric, Westinghouse and the Bureau of Home Economics coming to use media to shape peoples’ understanding of technology and everyday life. I examine useful media in the form of promotional, educational, and industrial films as well as television advertisements and explore how media were used to facilitate or supplement institutional directives from 1915 to 1959-bookended by the earliest filmic demonstration of home appliances in the Panama-Pacific Expositions and the celebration of the kitchen modernisation as key to the distinction between liberal capitalist and Soviet communism in the famous “Kitchen Debate” in 1959.
- Christie Cheng - Migrating Optics. Radical documentaries on labour.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Lee Grieveson (principal) and Dr Luke de Noronha (subsidiary)
Accessible digital media and screening circuits have enabled activist filmmakers to document more intimate and grounded perspectives on migrant struggles and amplify their demands for better labour and living conditions. These shifting documentary visibilities also attest to concurrent developments of precarious migration taking place beyond the excessively mediatised scenes of crisis migration in Europe and the US. My research examines the rise in radical documentaries on migrant labour that emerged during this post-2015 context of precarious migrant hypervisibility and how they provide alternative optics to understanding the ways in which migration and border regimes have intensified. It looks at documentaries on Syrian migrants who wind up rebuilding post-war Lebanon; deportee labour in Tijuana’s growing call centre industry; “illegalised” sex workers and their demands for the autonomy to migrate and work in Europe and so on to understand how these regimes are set up to govern mobile subjects as racialised labour rather than their violent expulsion from the sovereign territories of a nation state.
- Maria Laura Sciascia - Refashioning Italianess: the role of costume in contemporary Italian cinema.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Stella Bruzzi (principal) and Prof. John Dickie (subsidiary)
My research would explore the often neglected role of costume designers and the importance of costumes in Italian cinema, from the period defined as the economic boom up to nowadays. Costumes are a subtle language in cinema and can say much about a society, Cinema has been and still is one of the main means to discover Italy and Italians by Italian themselves and by strangers. Talking about Italy, is not easy to define the prototype (or stereotype) of Italian man or woman, because in Italy many differentiations coexist and traditions also in dressing identify variation of Italianess: the Neapolitan, the Roman, the Milanese and the Sicilian are the most displayed on the screen.
The work would intersect two prominent field of Italian culture: fashion and cinema, where in Italy fashion two products covered an important role in making Italy famous.
- Ludwig Wagner - Queer South African Cinemas: A Critical Analysis.
Supervisor(s): Dr Hélène Neveu Kringelbach (principal) and Dr Keith Wagner (subsidiary)
Rather than celebrate their freedoms, South African queer filmmakers and their films instead have to contend with religious and cultural opposition, censorship, and public persecution. Whether examining themes at the forefront of public discourse—sexual violence, crime, and toxic masculinity; or exposing past shames—military torture, state-sanctioned child abuse, queer films place subjects which few want to engage with under a spotlight. My research is to investigate how queer South African films have prompted a cinematic revolution by confronting and exposing South Africa’s blindspots.
- Lakkaya Armahn Palmer - Ferocious Fatherhood: A Crisis in Fatherhood and Masculinity in American Horror Film, 1970s - present.
Supervisor(s): Professor Stella Bruzzi (principal) and Dr Cristina Massaccesi (subsidiary)
Developing ‘The Ferocious Father’ as a new theoretical concept, my research aims to explore the masculine identity as it was constructed in resistance to a newly emerging liberal society and with nostalgia for traditional heterosexual masculinity. There was an abrupt shift in the identity of the monster in horror films: from the external 'outsider' in films such as Dracula to ferocious fathers in the 1970s and beyond. For the first time, horror films portrayed fatherhood in peril and the destruction of families due to a fault of the fathers, such as Jack Torrance’s deteriorating mental health in The Shining.
My research is both a historical analysis of cinematic portrayals of men in the American family and an intervention into how these images relate to real life narratives of fatherhood and masculinity from the 1980s to present. Examining the crisis of fatherhood in horror film offers a new perspective on transgressive fatherhood and masculinity and advances understanding of unruly fatherhood in resistance to broader socio-political landscapes and, at times, in conjunction with them.
- Yixuan Wu - Les Films et Les Choses: Objects in the French Cinema from the New Wave through the 1970s.
Supervisor(s): Dr Jann Matlock (principal) and Prof. Jo Evans (subsidiary)
My PhD project will focus on cinematic objects that no one has discussed in a systematic analytical way. I will delve into three categories of objects on-screen: the planar such as paintings, photographs, and maps; the spatial that are carriers of movements like automobiles, stairs, and bridges; and the triaxial that includes all the everyday objects in between. My research will base on the close analysis of film texts, combined with multidisciplinary methods, including theories of the space and the senses, theories of everyday life, and the new historicism as developed by Stephen Greenblatt and Roger Chartier.
- Julia Ryng - Can documentary films challenge Polish homophobia? Fostering understanding through documentaries between rural Poland and the LGBT+ community.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Richard Mole (Principal) and Prof. Stella Bruzzi (Subsidairy)
This project aims to provide a unique insight into the impact of documentary films. The uniqueness lies firstly in the study of impact on publics ideologically opposed to the specific message of a film. Secondly, it will combine the theories and methodologies of two disciplines that study the impact of film, namely political cinema scholarship and media and communications. Finally, the specific subject of study will be communities in rural Poland and their views on LGBT rights. Altogether, the investigation will produce a contextualised understanding of the changing nature of Polish socio-political landscape and shed light on the power of documentary films as tools of resistance on one hand and of fostering community understanding on the other.
- Qionglin Lou - Visualise the Invisible: Ageing Women in the Sinophone Cinema
Supervisor(s): Prof. Claire Thompson (Principal), Dr Tom Cunliffe (Subsidairy) and Dr Stefano Rossoni (Subsidairy)
Ageing, as a multifaceted phenomenon, intersects biological, social, and cultural dimensions, exhibiting mutable and performative characteristics that complicate signification and identification processes. In Western academia, the gendering of age has become crucial, particularly concerning how older women are discursively constructed under the broad term “age.” Despite significant developments in ageing theories, there remains a conspicuous gap in the systematic analysis of ageing women in greater China, a region experiencing economic volatility and political turbulence alongside a growing older population. Hence, this research seeks to address this gap by focusing on the depiction of older women in Sinophone cinema, a cultural domain deeply interwoven with the ideologies of capitalism, post-socialism, and neoliberalism, all influenced by historical layers of colonialism and neo-colonialism. The research aims to investigate and interrogate the notion of “ageing” and demonstrate how the cinematic discourse manipulates the gendered ageing body, using it as a tool to implicate and signify the complexities of transcultural modernity and shifting identities.
French Studies
- Lucile Richard - From body to text: on the uses of voice in contemporary francophone women’s writing.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Mairéad Hanrahan (principal), Dr Jane Gilbert (subsidiary)
My AHRC-funded research focuses on the notion of voice and how it is used by contemporary francophone women writers. My thesis attempts to look at women’s writing from a new angle, resonating with the values of contemporary feminist thought, and anchored in the postcolonial francophone world. The notion of feminine writing, since it was introduced by Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay The Laugh of Medusa, has kept a central position in the study of women’s writing. Affirming the existence of gender-marked writing, this notion is very much anchored in second-wave differentialist feminism and has not been consistently challenged by later strands of feminism, in which the question of women’s writing as a whole has often been overlooked. With the recent emergence of movements aimed at breaking the silence on sexist and sexual violence, the idea of speaking up seems to have reached the very heart of feminist thought ; as women’s voices are conquering public space, the posture of women writers deserves renewed attention. My thesis examines how contemporary theoretical redefinitions of voice, and especially the works of Adriana Cavarero, can enlighten literary works produced from a minoritarian position, and attempting to give an existence to under-represented people. The concept of voice allows me to examine the ethical dimension of such texts, and explore notions of flexibility, relationality, proximity, and uniqueness. My thesis is currently focused on works by Assia Djebar, Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig.
Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Mie Jensen - Being Queer and Jewish: a Cross-Cultural Study of Ethno-Religious Experiences and Divides.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Sasha Roseneil (Vice-Chancellor and President of Sussex University) and Dr Seth Anziska (subsidiary)
Religious and LGBTQ+ identities have often been seen as conflicting and contradictory identities. In fact, many LGBTQ+ people experience at some point that they are faced with an ultimatum: to be secular and LGBTQ+ or to be religious and repress their sexuality. This binary persists despite socio-cultural changes in both the secular public sphere and within religious institutions. While there has been conducted research on religious institutions’ stance on LGBTQ+ matters and heterosexual religious people’s views and attitudes, LGBTQ+ people themselves, and especially women, have received less scholarly attention. Furthermore, scholars of religion and sexuality have rarely considered that Judaism and Jewishness are not only religious but also ethnic and cultural identities. Mie is, therefore, interested in non-heterosexual Jewish women’s sexual and Jewish identities. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to bring together queer, feminist, and religious theories.
Mie’s doctoral research, which is funded by the ESRC, is focusing on how non-heterosexual Jewish women in England and Israel navigate, express, explore, sustain, and negotiate their sexual and Jewish identities in the 21st century. In addressing this aim, Mie (i) maps non-heterosexual Jewish women’s lived experiences and practices in their own words to provide more nuanced insights into contemporary lived experiences; (ii) presents the first empirical research on non-heterosexual Jewish women in the UK; and (iii) demonstrates the complex and dynamic interplays between the personal, socio-cultural, and national by paying particular attention to understandings and experiences of Jewishness and queerness, the procreative-norm, the couple-norm, and trauma.
In it, she argues that the negotiation, experience, and expression of non-heterosexual women’s sexuality is deeply rooted in their Jewish identities. While previous studies and scholarship has explored LGBTQ+ identities to various religious traditions, she argues that cultural and ethnic Jewishness influence non-heterosexual women as well. In addition to her PhD research, she is, among other things, interested in LGBTQ+ Holocaust Studies, antisemitism from a gender and sexuality perspective, and trauma research.Mie earned her MA in Sociology (First Class Honours) and MRes in Social Science (Distinction) at the University of Aberdeen. For more information on Mie’s work please see: https://www.mie-astrup-jensen.com/
- Arthur Davis (they / them) - Temporalities in Tension: Reimagining the 'Sexual Migrant' from a Temporal Standpoint.
Co-Supervisors: Richard Mole, Jennie Gamlin, Fiona Burns.
During my undergraduate studies at UCL, with a year at Sciences Po, Paris, I followed an interdisciplinary course-load, focusing on Political Science, Philosophy and French. After teaching English in Madrid for a year, I commenced a Master's in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies at Cambridge. Following this, I worked with the NHS Leadership Academy, before starting my PhD studies with UCL and Wellcome this September.
My research, which lies at the intersection of Sociology, Anthropology, Epidemiology and Sexuality Studies, seeks to introduce a "temporal" dimension to epidemiological research on "sexual migrants" in the UK. A central assumption of this project is that sexual migrants – whether from the UK or abroad – traverse temporal, as well as spatial, boundaries, and that sexual wellbeing and risk cannot be holistically understood without taking these temporal migrations into account. Through ethnographic research in a London sexual health clinic, I seek to uncover the extent to which abrupt shifts between timelines, such as "coming out of the closet" or transitioning, contribute to sexual risk. This research will have several policy implications, including a potential recalibration of eligibility criteria for targeted risk reduction interventions and an identification of further training needs for sexual health staff working with "temporal migrants".
- Yingxin Zhang - Strategies or Struggles? Unveiling Chinese Queer Immigrants’ Cross-Border Cooperative Marriages Upon Returning Home.
Supervisor(s): Dr Thibaut Raboin (principal), Dr Alex Hyde (subsidiary) and Dr Yuan He (subsidiary)
China’s economic growth has increased mobility among queer individuals, prompting many to move to Western LGBTQ-friendly countries. However, mobility does not necessarily resolve marriage pressures; in fact, numerous Chinese queers in Western countries actively seek cooperative marriages (contract heterosexual marriages between non-heterosexual women and men) performed in China to fulfil cultural/familial expectations. Despite the prevalence, research on such cross-border cooperative marriages upon returning home remains limited. Thus, this study examines how mobility and sexuality intersect in these transnational cooperative marriages, aiming to uncover the multifaceted factors behind, Chinese queers’ experiences in, and the facilitated/foreclosed new queer potentials of such marriages.
- Chiara Fehr - Algorithmized Girlhood: How Narratives of Sexual Empowerment on Algorithmic Social Media Influence the Sexual Self-Perception and Wellbeing of Teenage Girls.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Jessica Ringrose and Dr Lucia Gloria Vazquez Rodriguez
As social media platforms become digital extensions of our social reality, they increasingly constitute spaces where teenage girls express and explore their sexual selves. While over the past two decades platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have provided key spaces for self-exploration the introduction and proliferation of algorithmically aggregated social media feeds has facilitated a drastic shift in young people’s post-digital identities. Compared to platforms that encouraged self-determined content consumption through following-based feeds, algorithmically driven social media has created passive, self-centred user experiences, nurturing what Bhandari and Bimo (2022) have termed the ‘algorithmized self.’
At the epicentre of this shift is the popular app TikTok, whose algorithmically focused interface facilitates the interaction between algorithmic technology and young people’s self-building unlike any other widely used platform. Within TikTok’s fast paced algorithmic content cycle, sexual self-exploration constitutes a central theme in young people’s cultural discourse, as imaginations of sex become produced and re-produced daily in various trend and niche sub-cultures. This is of particular concern, as young people are increasingly looking to social media as digital extensions of their social lives to inform their sexual learning. My doctoral research aims to gain a deeper understanding of rapidly evolving algorithmically facilitated narratives of female sexuality on TikTok. Working with focus groups of teenage girls at schools around the country with a Phematerialist methodology, I explore how teenage girls use these narratives to express and explore their sexual self-concept both on and off the platform. Ultimately this research will have important implication for sexuality educational around navigating algorithmic social media.
- Ffion Hildred - Sisterhood in the British Army: Investigating Suspended Corporeality and Masculine Melancholy.
Supervisor(s): Dr Alex Hyde (principal), Prof. Mark Hewitson (subsidary) and Dr Maki Kimura (subsidary)
My project will investigate the corporeality - understood as experiences of the physical body - of service personnel in the British Army to examine how notions of identity and the self are forged through military culture. Centring the experiences of military service of trans and ethnic minority service personnel, I will investigate how corporeality can be understood as “suspended” in relation to experiences of masculine melancholy, which I define as gendered feelings of loss. I will use mixed methods to critically assess how military discourses of equality and diversity are constructed as well as experienced and understood by personnel in interactions with each other and the military institution. Examining how corporeality may be “suspended” through identifying gendered feelings of loss amongst service personnel in gender specific peer groupings such as sisterhood, my research will reframe how examinations of equality and diversity are conducted and will shift the dominant masculine paradigm currently present in critical military studies. My research will accordingly contribute to a large body of military scholarship (e.g., Harries-Jenkins, G., & Dandeker, C. 1994; Heggie, J. K. F. 2003), that has investigated the impact of the “Gay Ban”, a policy driven by ‘the rationale that homosexuality was incompatible with military service’ (Osborne and McGill, 2023: 8) and saw LGBTQ+ service personnel formally discharged from military service in the UK until 2000. Following a recent public government apology (Ministry of Defence, 2023) for the ban on gay service personnel made in response to the ‘LGBT Veteran’s Independent Review’ (Etherton, 2023), which addressed the lasting impact of the Armed Forces ban on Gay Service Personnel, my project will produce a nuanced and timely examination of gender and race relations through a specific intervention into the lived experiences of trans and ethnic minority service personnel in military service. My research, therefore, offers to produce empirical findings capable of impacting military policies concerned with the recruitment and management of minority members of military service.
- Natalie Abbott - Empowering LGBTQ+ Youth Through Digital Archiving: A Critical Pedagogical Approach.
Supervisor(s): Dr Rebecca Jennings (principal), Dr Emma Jones (subsidiary) and Dr Juliana Demartini Brito (subsidiary)
My research seeks to explore ways that young LGBTQ+ people might utilise their voices to (co-)create narratives of their own experiences, thus reclaiming their role as speaker, and ultimately as archivist. Emphasis will be placed on the technological tools and platforms required to do this, as creative and innovative methods may provide alternative – positive – solutions. This research will explore current trends in queer archival practice to assess what necessary lessons might be learned for the preservation of experiences of LGBTQ+ youth that can then be translated into educational contexts. The outcomes of this research have the potential to impact archival and pedagogical practice, while contributing to larger conversations within the academy. As well as contributing to the field, this work will generate educational resources that will have the potential to positively change education. My hope is that the creation of these resources will also have an impact on the potential for the generation of educational resources in the future.
German Studies
- Les Newsom - British and German Children’s Informative Introduction to Racism, Nationalism, Militarism, and Colonialism Through Education and Play, 1871-1918.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Mark Hewitson (principal), Dr Jeff Bowersox (subsidiary)
My research project is a comparative study of British and German childhood at the height of European Imperialism (1871-1918). The project will look at how children from both nations were exposed to racist, nationalist, colonial and militarist ideologies through toys, games, and children’s literature. Sources will include cultural artifacts such as the toys and games, children’s books, periodicals, and schoolbooks. Also, documents relating to official and unofficial polices of using these artifacts as direct and indirect propaganda, as well as personal recollections of childhood in diary or autobiographical form.
The main questions that my research will investigate are around the active use of childhood items to promote these ideas and the implications of that promotion in adult life. To what extent was the sale and publication of material designed for the consumption of children organised for propaganda reasons? Can the influence of childhood education and play be seen in their adult lives? Does the research demonstrate differences in the form and concentration of material between Britain and Germany and how does this relate to established historiography around imperialism, racism, and militarism? The research will also ask how these themes are still relevant today, with their legacy still debated and problematical in society today.
Health Humanities
- Janina Klement - Mapping Psychiatry Critique: A Transnational Study of Psychiatry Critique and its Reception in Western Europe and the US since ca. 1965.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Sonu Shamdasani (principal) and Dr Sarah Marks (subsidiary)
My research investigates the history of psychiatry critique in Europe and the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Psychiatry critique has been marked by a close interlocking of intellectual and practical endeavours that triggered a range of developments: critiques both from within and outside of the discipline led to comprehensive reforms and deinstitutionalisation of psychiatric practices, formation of patients’ collectives which abolished hierarchies in the relationship between psychiatrists and patients, experimentation with psychedelics and unconventional group settings, as well as psychiatry’s foray into the political sphere.
My project constitutes the first attempt to reconstruct the history of psychiatry critique from a transnational perspective. This approach allows for new epistemes of psychiatry critique and its (neglected) legacies: I consider psychiatry critique as a critical psychiatric movement that was successful in establishing new routes of knowledge transfer and exchanges of subversive practices despite internal disagreements. By considering psychiatry critique as an eclectic movement whose aspirations went well beyond the demand for psychiatric deinstitutionalisation (which has so far been held to be critical psychiatry’s sole legacy) my approach challenges existing historiographic narratives.
My project draws on untouched archives and interviews with contemporary witnesses that have so far been excluded from the historical record. These new historical perspectives on currently unrealised alternatives to orthodox psychiatry will allow for a range of policy implications for the permanently evolving and much disputed field of mental health care. This project is funded by a doctoral studentship from the Wellcome Trust. I hold degrees in history, politics, and cultural studies from University of Bonn and UCL. I am a teaching assistant at SELCS and affiliated member at the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health.
- Luisa Bayona - The place of musicality in psychic development.
Supervisor(s): Professor Sonu Shamdasani and Professor Lionel Baily
The thesis proposes that musicality plays a crucial role in early psychological development and explores how early musical interactions pave the way for cultural expressions of music. This interdisciplinary study centres on the process of self-development and the not yet thoroughly studied importance of innate human musicality in facilitating the developmental trajectory of becoming oneself and the relevance of the musical aspects for creativity, socialisation and emotional sharing.
- Dr Roghieh Dehghan - The concept of ‘moral injury’ and its association with mental health and trauma in Iranian torture survivors in the UK – a Phenomenological study.
Supervisor(s): Prof James Wilson (principal) and Dr Jenevieve Mannell (subsidairy)
There are strong indications of unmet mental health needs in traumatised refugees - torture being one such trauma. Yet, our current understanding of the psychological sequelae of trauma is epistemologically limited. As a result, some scholars and practitioners have developed moral injury as a recent concept in trauma discourse, with potential relevance to tortured refugees.
Moral injury, a concept for survivors’ responses to the transgression of their moral beliefs, seeks to address trauma’s lasting impacts. However, this concept has to date been solely based on Western military personnel, making its recent application in refugee research ethically and epistemically problematic. If moral injury is to serve the needs of traumatised refugees, a non- Eurocentric understanding of the concept is needed, its epistemic parameters grounded in lived experience.
The need for culturally appropriate notions in trauma discourse is also consistent with my clinical experience of working as a GP with traumatised refugees in the UK. That is why I hope that this project will contribute to a culturally sensitive approach to therapy for torture survivors. Since Iranians comprise the largest number of asylum seekers in the UK, with some having experienced torture, my study focuses on this cohort of trauma survivors. I first undertake a theoretical investigation of the concept of moral injury before conducting a phenomenological study to explore the impact of morally injurious events in Iranian torture survivors in the UK. This will be followed by focus groups with healthcare professionals and support workers to determine the clinical and policy implications of moral injury.
Italian Studies
- Elinora Lane - The Use of Emblems by Women in Sixteenth-Century Italy.
Supervisor(s): Dr Lisa Sampson (principal) and Dr Rembrandt Duits, Warburg Institute (subsidiary)
The aim of my research is to analyze how aristocratic women in the first half of the sixteenth century employed the emblem as a means to express their emerging gendered identities. Currently my analysis focuses on possible patterns among the emblems associated with female and male adopters, as well as to explicate role hierarchies and interaction networks that structure target audiences. I study how women exploited the emblem’s inherent ambiguity to play with multivocal interpretations and to respond to their interlocutors’ reactions. In addition, I plan to investigate how women’s production and reception of emblems reflect broader societal changes in attitude about women’s roles, characters and abilities.
- Caitlin Kane - Queer Embodiment in Accounts of Medieval Italian Women’s Relationships with Christ.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Catherine Keen (principal) and Prof. Robert Mills (subsidiary)
Caitlín’s research focuses on the intersection of medieval religious devotion and queer historical studies, specifically examining how female mystics and religious in 13th- and 14th-century Italy engaged with Christ’s queer body as a point of identification and desire. This study aims to explore how these women’s spiritual experiences with a gender-ambiguous Christ challenge modern heteronormative and cisgender interpretations of medieval religiosity. Caitlín will investigate the works and vitae of various Italian religious women to trace the evolution of queer mystical expressions over time, particularly among laywomen such as Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno. She will explore how these writings respond to developments in Italian literature, politics, and penitential movements, situating them within their historical context. This research seeks to shift the understanding of these queer expressions from exceptional instances to part of a broader devotional trend in medieval Italy. After completing a BA in History and an MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCL, Caitlín worked as a Library and Special Collections Assistant at New College, Oxford, and the Bodleian History Faculty Library. Caitlín has now returned to UCL to undertake her Wolfson-funded PhD at SELCS.
Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies
- Sophie Chauhan - Dis/Assembling Racial Power: 'Asianness' and the Regeneration of Race.
Supervisor(s): Dr. Xine Yao (Principal) and Dr. Victoria Redclift (Subsidiary)
This thesis revolves around a racial category at the peripheries of whiteness, tracing its ambivalent uses as both an accomplice and threat to white racial power. Rather than approach ‘Asianness’ in fixed ethnic, cultural or geographic terms, I explore the relationship between its forms and functions of in the US and Australia from the nineteenth century to the present day. I engage methods from the humanities and social sciences to pursue two interrelated questions: (i) How has ‘Asianness’ been constructed, adapted and mobilised in the service of settler colonial and racial capitalist projects in these two contexts? And (ii) how is this racial formation (re)articulated in the anti-racist activism of Asians in Naarm/Melbourne and NYC today? By examining the genealogies of ascendant ‘Asianness’ and unpacking its contemporary re-articulations, this thesis aims to chart the conceptual and material terrain of contemporary whiteness; map its emergent fault lines; and offers vital insight into how anti-racist activists might exploit them.
Characterisations of post-racial ‘mixedness’ and economically potent ‘Asian-ness’ significantly shape Western thinking about the future of race. This two-part thesis argues that, where these categories converge, ‘Asian-white mixedness’ holds a vital stake in the growth or decline of white racial power. Section one analyses the cultural production of Asian-white mixedness to detail its entanglement in anti-Black and settler colonial racial projects. Section two presents a comparative ethnography of (mixed-race) Asian activists in Melbourne and NYC who refuse the solicitations of whiteness in favour of anti-racist coalition-building. Overall, this interdisciplinary, transnational and intersectional study explores how those made covertly complicit in white racial power can become active agents in its undoing.
- Lewis Barnes - Automating the Crisis: Algorithmic Statecraft, Racialisation, and Economy.
Supervisor(s): Professor Tim Jordan (Principal) and Dr Luke de Noronha (Subsidiary)
Automating the Crisis addresses the use of algorithmic technologies by states. Focused on a set of case studies in border security, policing, and welfare benefits administration, the project asks how algorithmic decision-making technologies are affecting “statecraft”, the way states manage their citizens and non-citizen populations. In particular, it builds on existing analyses of algorithmic racism to ask what algorithmic statecraft has to do with “race”.
My PhD project asks how technologies of automated statecraft should be understood in relation to the convergence of racism and capitalist economy. Through interviews and commercial, parliamentary, professional and academic sources, I am analysing UK and EU case studies, such as Durham Police’s reoffending prediction tool and a welfare fraud detection algorithm used by the French government. I will theorise how these technologies introduce qualitative changes in the practices of the state, asking how, for example, the automated state reasons, or how it sees. I look at these changes in relation to the historically developed logics of "racial capitalism".
Scandinavian Studies
- Georgia Gould - Tablets and Trade: how trade, migration and social status influenced motif and technique in Medieval Scandinavian tablet-weaving.
Supervisor(s): Dr Haki Antonsson (principal) and Prof. Jane Hawkes (University of York)
Tablet-weaving is a form of loom weaving in which a yarn warp is threaded through tablets, also known as cards. The tablets can be turned forwards and backwards, either as a full pack or each turned individually, with a weft yarn passed through the warp at each completed turn of the pack. In this way, the yarn warp becomes a textured band. From these twisted threads a sophisticated pattern or motif can emerge on the surface of the textile. My thesis analyses how human migration and the expansion of international trade networks influenced the way in which the motifs and techniques of tablet-weaving evolved within Scandinavia and Northern Europe during the Middle Ages. The elaborate tablet-woven textiles within the ninth-century Oseberg ship burial provide a framework for this study. In addition, the investigation of textiles from the British Museum, Kulturhistorisk museet in Norway, Nordiska museet in Sweden and more brings to light the significance of the textile fibres and weaving techniques which shaped the narrative history of tablet-weaving. Using fresh data collected from an array of international textual and archaeological sources, my thesis aims to provide a new perspective on the story of textile production and trade across Medieval Northern Europe.
Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies
- Victoria Rasbridge - Intersecting Identities: Representing Queenship in the Golden Age comedia.
Supervisor(s): Dr Alexander Samson (principal) and Dr Lisa Samson (subsidiary)
My AHRC-funded research explores the representation of queenship on the early modern Spanish stage, focusing specifically on the depiction of fictional queens in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century. Identity has long been acknowledged as the interaction between experience, allegiance, and community, constructed at the intersection of multiple ideological demands and social categorisations. Drawing on this understanding of the intrinsic multiplicity of identity, my research establishes a new intersectional framework through which the queen’s character and the crisis that her identity was undergoing as a result of tensions within Spanish imperial ideology can be understood. In so doing, it challenges existing critical typologies of female characters, and demonstrates how female roles cannot be neatly contained by static and one-dimensional categories of identity. By applying an intersectional lens to the study of the comedia generally, and to the figure of the queen specifically, my thesis identifies how playwrights variably utilise, manipulate, and invert interlocking systems of power in order to shape the creation of their characters.
- Michael Protheroe - Seeing Queerly: Embodied Spectatorship in Chilean and Venezuelan Queer Cinema.
Supervisor(s): Professor Deborah Martin (principal) and Dr Emily Baker (subsidiary)
This research project examines contemporary queer Chilean and Venezuelan cinema which appeals to a more embodied form of spectatorship than traditional cinema. In doing so, this project will interrogate how such cinema explores and represents queer space, queer time and what I will propose is a queer visuality specific to these films. The films in my corpus invite a synaesthetic approach that attends to the materiality of film as they deconstruct the traditional cinematic dependence on the visual economy at the expense of the other senses. This research will also focus on the (queer) lived-body and how such a body might occupy (queer) space and time and how the films in this corpus perceive, express and navigate a queer spatiotemporal framework. This emphasis on bodies, space and time will be aided by a methodological and theoretical framework of phenomenology, specifically the film phenomenology first espoused by Vivian Sobchack in her Address of the Eye (1991), which I will develop through a productive combination with Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006). I aim to put into practice a kind of “queer film phenomenology” as a mode of approaching cinema that attends to its materiality and also its queerness, separately and in concert.
- Oliver Schwarz - Nietzsche in Rio: A cultural transfer 1950–1975.
Supervisor(s): Dr Martin Liebscher (principal) and Dr Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (subsidiary)
The specific aim of my doctoral research project is the reconstruction of the Brazilian reception of German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's ideas – especially among avant-garde groups, such as the Brazilian second and third generation modernists in Rio de Janeiro, and the burgeoning counter culture in the 1960s and 1970s Ipanema. A particular focus is thereby on the dynamics of the cultural transfer, hence on international networks, intellectual mediators and gobetweens of the globalised 'World Republic of Letters', that helped these ideas to spread around the globe. My work can therefore be placed right at the edge of fields such as Intellectual History, German- and Brazilian Studies’.
- Wang Yilin - Toward Symbiosis: Representing Animals and Human-Nonhuman Relations in Contemporary Latin American Literature
Supervisor(s): Dr Emily Baker (principal) and Prof. Florian Mussgnug (subsidiary)
My AHRC-funded research explores the representation of animals and human-nonhuman relations in contemporary Latin American literature with a focus on comparing and contrasting the works in 1950s–80s with the ones in 2000s–10s. The consideration of animals and their entanglements with humans has been an ongoing subject of critical discussion for scholars from different academic backgrounds. Drawing from pivotal theories in critical animal studies, my research sets out as a comparative ecological study which analyses how the depictions of animals and interspecies relations between two periods vary as they reflect and respond to the dynamic social and political realities of their times. In this manner, this research brings a timely interdisciplinary contribution to the study of animal writing in the contemporary Latin American context as it rereads and reinterprets a series of fables, novels and short stories from a posthuman theoretical perspective, highlighting the differences and developments in portraying a close but ambiguous cross-species community. In recognising the innovative understanding of animals, humans and interspecies relationships provided by contemporary Latin American literature, this research sheds light on the power and significance of writing in demonstrating and encouraging an equal and symbiotic relationship between human and nonhuman species.
Translation Studies
- Asa Erh-Ya Tsui - Combining Critical Discourse Analysis, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and Natural Language Processing Approach to the Impact of Ideology on News Translation (A study of western English mainstream media on the evolving crisis of the US-China economic relationship).
Supervisor(s): Dr Federico Federici (principal), Dr Christophe Declercq (subsidiary) and Dr Claire Yi-Yi Shih (subsidiary)
Translation and media play an essential role in our society, particularly in an era of sweeping globalisation trends and unprecedented advances in technology development. By their common nature, both are instruments of communication, their neutrality has always been in question since they are susceptible to the impact of human-related factors, especially ideology. Drawing on Fairclough's three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis (CDA), along with Halliday's systemic functional grammar (SFG) and Martin and White's appraisal theory within the paradigm of CDA, my study attempts to examine the ideology concealed underneath news translation via a mixed research method approach- combining CDA, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and Natural Language Processing approach.
- Shaoqiang Zhang - Developing A User-Oriented Accessibility Evaluation Model for Translated Health Resources.
Supervisor(s): Prof Federico Federici (principal) and Dr Vicent Montalt (subsidiary)
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) recognises access to health information and digital resources and technologies as a basic human right. Enjoying accessible and digital bilingual, as well as translated health resources is a fundamental human right, especially for vulnerable people such as elderly citizens, people with hearing or visual impairments, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. However, health information is always written in a way that is difficult for the layperson to understand, thus creating barriers for them to use and act.
My research aims to identify the linguistic, textual, and visual features which have an important impact on the accessibility and understandability of bilingual health-themed resources and explore the best practice model in health translation by integrating textual and visual information. In order to alleviate the cascading impact caused by inaccessible health information and improve the experience and satisfaction of users with the widest range of abilities, this research project will develop a user-oriented accessibility evaluation framework to enable more effective health education and the promotion of resources in multilingual, multicultural societies.
- Lucelle Pardoe - Decolonizing the Curriculum through Translation: Indonesian Literature in Dutch Education.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Kathryn Batchelor (principal) and Prof. Reinier Salverda (subsidiary)
This research responds to calls to decolonize institutions and curricula across Europe by making a case for research at the intersection of Translation Studies and Education Studies. Using the Netherlands and Indonesia as a case study, this research unfolds the potential for counter-narratives from Indonesian literature to de-center Europe in Dutch education through translation.
- Fang Shaohang - Interpreters' online preparation behaviour.
Supervisor(s): Dr Claire Shih (principal) and Dr Caiwen Wang (subsidiary)
Interpreting for a specialised assignment requires linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge. Different from translators who can learn this knowledge while translating, interpreters have little time to do so and thus have to acquire it mainly by preparation. Among professional interpreters, there are some common preparation strategies like reading the documents sent by clients, searching online for background information, and building a glossary. But regarding the more specific questions about, for example, where to find the most relevant knowledge and how to make them available for interpreting, few detailed and thorough approaches have been provided. As a result, some trainee interpreters may find the preparation process confusing and do not know where to start. Collecting evidence about the behaviour of interpreters’ preparation could reveal some commonalities and idiosyncrasies of their practice. By comparing the behaviour of different interpreters with an eye on their interpreting quality, good practice may be found. However, while translation studies have seen researches on translator’s behaviour of web searching, there is little research done investigating the interpreters’ behaviour during preparation. Therefore, researching the process of interpreting preparation could help fill the gap and offer empirical evidence for interpreting preparation.
- Huihuang Jia - The Impact of Subtitling Speed on Viewers Watching Experience: Evidence from Eye Tracking and EEG Technologies.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Jorge Díaz-Cintas (principal) and Prof. Agnieszka Szarkowska (subsidiary)
Huihuang's doctoral study sets out to work in the emerging and blooming field of audiovisual translation, with special emphasis on cognitive approaches to subtitling. The main aim is to explore empirically the impact that different subtitling display rates, under various linguistic conditions, can have on viewers' watching experience.
- Chloe Franklin - The Impact of Information Inaccessibility: A Community-Based Study Based on the Experiences of d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Communities in England.
Supervisor(s): Prof. Federico Federici (Principal) and Prof. David Alexander (Subsidiary)
The COVID-19 Pandemic highlighted the importance of information accessibility in appropriate formats. England's communication strategy throughout this pandemic demonstrated that the study group was an afterthought in their comminques, with inadequate communication methods utilised. This research aims to investigate these failings and areas in which communication must be improved, using guidance from the study group.
- Yunke Deng - Accessible video gaming for visually impaired players in mainland China.
Supervisor(s): Dr Xiaochun Zhang (Principal) and Prof. Jorge Diaz-Cintas (Subsidiary)
Video games have become a leading form of entertainment worldwide across different platforms and devices. However, people with diverse abilities often find themselves excluded from playing video games due to accessibility challenges. The blind and visually impaired persons (BVIPs) are likely to face significant obstacles due to the visual-centric nature of videogaming. My research focuses on game accessibility for visually impaired persons in mainland China and also explores accessibility features in video game design, especially for visually impaired people.
- Dody Chen - Game Localisation in Live Game Streaming.
Supervisor(s): Dr Xiaochun Zhang (principal) and Dr Rocio Banos Pinero (subsidiary)
In the Chinese context, many game streamers are conducting English-Chinese game localisation practices based on non-localised English video games in live streaming. These activities not only include the streamers’ gameplay such as the demonstration of game content but also cover streamers’ speech to localise orally English texts on the screen with special techniques (e.g. dubbing). The objective of Dody’s PhD project is to incorporate streaming-based game localisation behaviours into the research field, which significantly influences game localisation, audiovisual translation, multimodality, and game studies.
- Gu Zeqing - Exploring Materiality in Translated Books: Intersecting Book History and Translation Studies in Late Qing and Early Republican Shanghai (1895 - 1920).
Supervisor(s): Prof. Kathryn Batchelor (principal) and Prof. Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (subsidiary)
Drawing on concepts, methods, and topics from book history, the thesis offers a material perspective for researching translation as a response to calls for the medial turn in translation studies. This study views translated books as physical objects rather than texts they contain and investigates different uses of translation in terms of materiality. The whole research is set in Shanghai during the Late Qing and the Early Republican period when China was undergoing radical transformations to embrace modernity. Translation played a crucial role at the social and cultural level as a remarkable driving force that massively introduced Western ideas and concepts to China. As the centre of printing and publishing across the country at that time, Shanghai witnessed great changes in print and book culture. Focusing on translated books published by the Commercial Press, then the largest modern publishing company, this research attempts to restore the life cycle of these translations as cultural commodities by exploring multiple agents and other elements involved in the whole process. In addition, the thesis also studies the copyright of translated books as another aspect of materiality. Generally speaking, translation is considered a derivative work, with its copyright owned by the original author. However, that period was unusual because the notion of copyright and relevant laws and regulations were still in their infancy. Translators tended to enjoy a high status while the copyright of original authors from the West was largely ignored. By introducing a material perspective from book history, the thesis, as a whole, attempts to formally enrich translation studies and further promote its interdisciplinary development.